Robert Hewitt is an artist and screen printer who works for family-run Red Oak Roller in Basildon, Essex. He says that as an artist he has always been invested in the process and approaches screen printing with the same mindset. Here he breaks down his eyeball-grabbing Print Or Die design

(1) This design was illustrated after seeing a #printordie hashtag floating about on social media – instantly, this resonated with me and I had to draw a crazy character to represent this. Print or die may sound extreme, but I feel it defines the passion that printers share in the industry.

(2) The artwork was sketched, inked and rendered digitally in Adobe Photoshop. I kept in mind that it would be printed on a six-colour M&R Chameleon manual screen printing press, so the colourway was kept simple with complementary colours that work well together and would separate without any issues.

(3) With a flattened image I separated the design manually using Photoshop, pulling each colour and tweaking the separations until I was happy with how it looked and confident it would print well. I interlocked the halftones for maximum ink coverage to achieve a vibrant print and output the film positives at 65lpi with a round dot at 22°.

(4) The screens were coated 1/1 using Amex Screen Sol QT emulsion on yellow mesh and exposed for 60–90 seconds on a Natgraph exposure unit.

(5) For the base I used Amex Super White Discharge and then printed Wilflex Epic Rio inks wet-on-wet in this order: red 032, green 362, cyan 312 and purple 267. This was followed by a highlight white, which was Total Ink Solutions Bright White.

(6) The mesh counts I used were a 90T for the base and the rest were printed with 120T.

(7) The print was cured for around 90 seconds at 160°C.

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